Location

226A American Modern

Description

Capturing the soaring heights of New York City, this painting is a dramatic bird's-eye view of Broadway and Wall Street, showing a conglomeration of buildings at left and center, and the Church Street elevated train at right. Sheeler based his composition on an image from the short movie Manhatta (1920), which he made with the photographer Paul Strand. One of the first avant-garde American films, Manhatta celebrates the dynamic metropolis through a series of carefully composed shots of Lower Manhattan. As typical with Sheeler's work, the artist simplified forms and eliminated textures in Church Street El to concentrate on rhythmic interplay of shapes and color, and patterns of light and shadow.

Inscriptions

Inscription

Signed lower right: "Sheeler 1920"

Charles Sheeler

Charles Sheeler American, 1883-1965
Philadelphia-born Charles Sheeler was a well-known precisionist painter and photographer. After studying at the School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia (1900-3), he spent the next three years as a student of painter William Merritt Chase at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Around 1910 he took up photography as a way to support himself.
Sheeler began as an architectural photographer, documenting buildings for Philadelphia architects, but was soon taking pictures of paintings and other works of art. He continued to paint (in 1913 a group of his works were exhibited in the famous Armory Show in New York) and to photograph, often using his photographs as the basis for paintings. In 1917 his photographs were included in a three-person show along with Paul Strand and Morton Schamberg at Marius de Zayas's Modern Gallery in New York.
Two years later Sheeler moved to New York and in 1920 collaborated with Paul Strand on the avant-garde film Manhatta (originally titled New York the Magnificent). In 1923 he began working as a staff photographer for Condé Nast publications. Four years later he received his most important commercial commission when Ford Motor Company hired him to photograph its River Rouge plant. A powerful series of images celebrating American industry resulted and were widely published. They also served as an inspiration for a number of his paintings.
In 1939 a small group of Sheeler's photographs were included in a retrospective of his work organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Over the next decade he worked as staff photographer for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and focused primarily on painting in his own work, especially during the late 1940s and 1950s. In 1959, after suffering a stroke, Sheeler stopped painting and photographing; he died six years later from a second stroke. M.M.

Provenance

1977-

The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio

-1977

(Robert Schoelkopf Gallery, New York, NY, sold to the Cleveland Museum of Art)

?

(Harold Diamond, New York, NY) 1 1

Probably 1940-at least 1969

Elizabeth Lentz Horter [1900-1985], South Langhorne, PA

By 1930-probably 1940

Earl Horter [1880-1940], Philadelphia, PA 1 2

Provenance Footnotes

1 1 According to Andy Schoelkopf, Harold Diamond acquired the painting from Mrs. Horter, but because Diamond had little experience in selling Sheeler's works, he consigned the painting to Robert Schoelkopf to sell. Diamond most likely never owned the painting. Schoelkopf sold the painting rather quickly after a visit from Sherman Lee, who happened to see the painting soon after it was received from Diamond.

2 1Horter's ownership of this painting by 1934 is confirmed by an exhibition of his collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in that year.

Jaffe, Irma B. "The Forming of the Avant-Garde, 1900-30. " In The Genius of American Painting, edited by John Wilmerding. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1973. Mentioned: p. 238, Reproduced: p. 239

Stern, Robert A.M., Gregory Gilmart, and Thomas Messins. New York 1930: Architecture and Urbanism Between the Two World Wars. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1987. Reproduced: p. 53

Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Charles Sheeler: Paintings and Drawings, (13 October 1987- 3 January 1988); traveled to New York, Whitney Museum of American Art (28 January-17 April 1988); Dallas, Dallas Museum of Art (15 May-10 July 1988), no. 16, p. 80, also included parts from essay by Carol Troyen and Erica E. Hirshler, "From the Eyes Inward: Paintings and Drawings by Charles Sheeler," (pp. 9-11, 36-37), which point out the fact that the CMA painting was derived from Manhatta.

Cleveland, Cleveland Museum of Art, The Precisionist Aesthetic in American Art (24 January-9 April 1989)

Philadelphia, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Mad for Modernism: Earl Horter and His Collection, (7 March-16 May 1999), plate 78, p. 122, also included two footnotes concerning Sheeler and his relationship to Horter (p. 61), and pp. 173, 180-181, 184.